Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Imaging is one of the key markets in the emerging space tech industry, and for good reason – there’s a proven and robust demand for imaging and Earth observation data among government, private and other clients. Orbital satellites satisfy some of this demand, and companies like Planet have grown sizeable businesses on building satellites that can provide this kind of data more affordably, but startup Near Space Labs is taking a different approach that provides imaging better suited to certain types of industries and uses.

“We decided to start a company and approach this from a totally new angle, and utilize this gap in aerospace, which is the stratosphere – twice higher than where airliners fly,” said Near Space Labs CEO Remarriages Matevosyan in an interview. “So from that vantage point, we have a very nice view of a very large area, we still can be very high resolution like an airplane or a drone would be, and we can also be very frequent: Currently, we have a daily cadence of imagery, which is unprecedented in this industry at the resolutions that we provide.”

This kind of data is very useful for insurance, real estate and logistics companies, as well as for local municipalities, since it can provide highly relevant and timely data, in the form of very detailed images, quickly. That means you can check progress on a large construction project from an overall perspective, monitor emerging traffic congestion issues or check operational efficiency at a port from a top-down view. Traditional satellites aren’t great at providing this easily and affordably to businesses of all sizes, either because high-resolution optics from that altitude require hugely expensive spacecraft to operate, or because the younger companies working with more affordable satellites can’t achieve the resolution needed from that operating height, or provide data that’s as timely or available on an on-demand basis.

“Our platform is made to be scalable, and it’s made to be easy to launch in areas where people need it,” Matevosyan said. “And that’s an advantage that we have against solutions that aren’t able to be very reactive to say, a disaster. We can easily fly during and after wildfires for example, whereas others [like drones and airplanes] would have a hard time.”

Matevosyan says Near Space Labs can deploy one of its weather balloon-based stratospheric imaging platforms every day, after which it’ll ascend to its operating height and focus on an area taking photographs while aloft for a couple of hours, then come back down and provide immediate access to the resulting high-resolution images. Near Space Labs has developed its own hardware and software in-house, resulting in a proprietary robotic platform that gathers the data it then provides to clients.

In addition to data, Near Space is working on building analytics layers for the photography it gathers to provide its customers with more of a one-stop shop for both imaging and interpretation.

Near Space Labs has investment from Draper Associates, Wireframe Ventures and the Urban-X accelerator run by automaker Mini. Urban-X is focused on companies that help alter the shape of urban living, and Matevosyan says they see very big opportunities in helping municipalities reimagine how their cities operate, given the type and immediacy of imaging they can provide.

Check out this high-res, 33MB version of the featured image above for an idea of how much detail Near Space Labs can capture:

 

Neuron Mobility, a Singapore-based startup, has closed an $18.5 million new financing round as it looks to scale its e-scooter startup in international markets.

The new financing round, dubbed Series A, was funded by GSR Ventures, a venture capital firm which was the first institutional investor in Chinese ride-hailing giant DiDi Chuxing, and Square Peg, Australia’s largest venture capital firm.

Existing investors SeedPlus, SEEDS Capital also participated in the round. The three-year-old startup has raised about $23.5 million to date.

Neuron Mobility, which began its journey in Singapore, operates an eponymous e-scooters rental platform. In recent years and quarters, Neuron has expanded to cities in Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand.

Neuron’s e-scooters are affordable in every market where they are available. In Brisbane, Australia, for instance, anyone can begin a trip with a Neuron’s bike by paying one Australian Dollar (68 U.S. cents) and then 38 Australian cents for each minute of the ride, Zachary Wang, co-founder and chief executive of Neuron, told TechCrunch in an interview.

These scooters can go as fast as 25 kilometer per hour, and automatically slow down at certain places such as near a school. Wang said the startup closely works with city councils to understand how these e-scooters should operate.

On a single charge, a Neuron electric scooter can travel up to 60 kilometers (37.2 miles). These e-scooters are equipped with a swappable battery. Once the ride is finished, a customer can drop the bike at any nearby parking station or any suitable location. Neuron works with a large number of people who actively swap the batteries on these scooters.

Like India’s electric scooter and bike startups Bounce and Yulu, Neuron Mobility also designs its electric scooters but relies on Chinese equipment manufacturer for producing them. (Yulu recently inked a strategic deal with Bajaj Auto to task the Indian auto manufacturing giant with the production job.

As Neuron expands to international markets, it has had to halt its e-scooter rental service in home market of Singapore. Last month, Singapore said e-scooters could no longer operate on footpaths, creating major challenges for all the players. Wang said that Neuron still has teams that work from Singapore, but they have always focused on the larger Asia Pacific region and other markets. Besides, Neuron stopped its service in Singapore months before the nation passed any new law. (Prior to the recent order, Singapore had other issues with electric scooters.)

Neuron will use the fresh capital to further its footprint in the markets where it operates and explore building new categories, Wang said. “We feel we are in the midst of a wave where a number of technologies are falling into place that could help us improve our electric scooter and build more mobility solutions.” The startup is also exploring new markets, though Wang declined to name them.

Like in the United States, electric scooters and bikes have imploded in Southeast Asian markets, where a growing number of familiar brands such as Lime, Bird, Ofo, oBike and local players are increasingly expanding their presence.

China has reportedly ordered all foreign PC hardware and operating systems to be replaced in the next three years, intensifying an ongoing tech war. The country has attempted this sort of thing before halfheartedly, but this is the most serious effort yet to isolate itself from the influence of the western technology sector.

The order came from high up in the Chinese government earlier this year, according to a Financial Times report citing Chinese tech analysts. The goal is not simply to replace American and European software and operating systems with Chinese equivalents, but the hardware they run on as well.

China has previously ordered purges of western software, but they were more limited or related to certain security issues; there were efforts five years ago to wean the country off Android and Windows, but ultimately they proved abortive.

This time could very easily be different. The relationship between the U.S. and China has become strained, to say the least, especially in the world of tech, where the two countries have shifted from earnest rivals to real adversaries. The U.S. has recently moved to ban some large Chinese hardware providers, such as ZTE and Huawei, from use in American infrastructure (Huawei has called the ban “unconstitutional”), and miscellaneous other policy decisions have widened the rift.

The apparently decisive nature of the order, then, should come as no surprise. The goal is reportedly to replace 30 percent of the computers and software by the end of 2020, an additional 50 percent in 2021, and the remaining 20 percent in 2022.

The three year “3-5-2” plan is ambitious to say the least. Tens of millions of devices will need to be replaced, but it isn’t as simple as trading out HP machines for Chinese-manufactured ones. The components and software must be Chinese as well, so Intel and AMD processors are out, as are Nvidia GPUs, ARM architectures, Sony image processors, and so on.

This won’t be quite the shock it seems, however, as many Chinese companies have been preparing for this eventuality for years. China has made its desire to establish independence from U.S. companies especially quite clear and many state-backed enterprises have been unable to use U.S. suppliers for some time.

Even so, Chinese equivalents to products like Windows and Android have nowhere near the level of maturity and developer support necessary to swap them out with no consequences. And the ban may hamstring other major efforts like the country’s push to dominate the AI ecosystem. If Chinese government-backed researchers are unable to use the same tools as their academic and private counterparts elsewhere in the world, their results will almost certainly suffer.

The specifics of the plan are still confidential but will likely trickle out as they begin to be enforced. But this is likely to be a major driver of industry dynamics for several years as suppliers, developers, and manufacturers all learn to navigate the divergent markets.

Despite the financial success of of the goofily likable “Aquaman,” Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman is probably still the biggest draw in DC’s Extended Universe. She’s returning to big screens next year in “Wonder Woman 1984”, and Warner Bros released the first trailer over the weekend.

As its title suggests, the sequel jumps about 70 years ahead from its predecessor’s World War I setting, as the trailer makes clear with some obligatory ’80s fashion and music.

The trailer features plenty of shots of Gadot in action, and she even gets to show off a new Wonder Woman costume. The film also brings back Chris Pine as Steve Trevor — fans will recall (spoiler!) that Trevor died at the end of the first film, but it seems that he’s back from the dead and back in the middle of the story.

The trailer also provides glimpses of Kristen Wiig as an archeologist who eventually becomes the villainous Cheetah and Pedro Pascal as the tycoon Maxwell Lord. And there are new scenes set in Wonder Woman’s childhood home, the mythical island of Themyscira.

“Wonder Woman 1984” is scheduled for release on June 5, 2020. Gadot and Pine aren’t the only “Wonder Woman” alums returning for the sequel — director Patty Jenkins is also back behind the camera.

Jow, the French e-grocery app — which combines recipes, recommendations and online grocery ordering — has raised $7 million in new funding.

The round is led by Stride.VC, alongside Caterina Fake and Jyri Engeström from Yes VC, and Shan-Lyn Ma, the co-founder and CEO of Zola. Previous seed backers, DST global partners and eVentures, also participated.

Launched in 2018 and now supporting five of France’s leading grocery retailers (Monoprix, Carrefour, Auchan, Chronodrive, and E.Leclerc), Jow’s app claims to let you complete your weekly online food shop in as little as a minute (once you’ve been on-boarded, of course).

It does this by creating customised menus, tailored to each user and household, and then automatically fills your online shopping cart with the required ingredients. The idea is to answer the question: “what’s for dinner tonight?” while providing a more cost-effective alternative to recipe kits such as Blue Apron or Hellofresh, and less reliance on take-outs from the likes of Deliveroo or Uber Eats.

“Doing your weekly shopping online can take you up to one hour,” says Jow co-founder and CEO Jacques-Edouard Sabatier. “You waste a lot of time looking for the right product category, sub category, scrolling through hundreds of references, you finally find your product, put it in your cart, and repeat this process up to 40 times (the number of items in your cart)! It’s a horrendous experience, with no added value at all for the customer”.

That’s in contrast to brick ‘n’ mortar grocery shopping, argues Sabatier, where there is an opportunity to “feel, taste and smell the products”. He says it’s the terrible user experience of grocery shopping online that has limited its e-grocery growth. Jow aims to change that.

“Jow creates a customised menu, just for you, with simple and delicious recipes,” explains Sabatier. “Our food recommendation engine considers your tastes, your kitchen appliances, whether or not you have children and checks the availability of the ingredients in your supermarket. Jow then automatically fills your cart with all the ingredients you need to cook the meals”.

In addition, Jow offers a customised list of your repeat purchases, and its recommendation engine claims to help you choose the exact quantities needed to avoid waste. You can also check out with a single click, and the app will synchronise with your chosen supermarket delivery or pick up service.

Noteworthy is that the app’s recipe to cart feature represents on average 75% of the products Jow users add to their cart. Staple products such as toilet paper, beverages, toothpaste etc. make up the remaining 25%.

The app is free for end users, seeing the Paris and New York-based startup generate affiliate revenue from supermarkets that want to use the service to acquire younger, mobile-first customers. The business model is asset light, too, since Jow is largely built on top of the existing infrastructure and capabilities of larger supermarkets.

“Apart from the 50x improvement on the e-grocery funnel, it’s unbelievable to see that to date, in a world where you have tailored and recommended experiences around music, video etc., you have no strong recommendation engine or experiences around food,” adds Sabatier.

In addition, the startup believes that more broadly it has created a mobile e-grocery experience that actually works. “E-grocery is one of the only e-commerce segments where desktop still prevails,” says Sabatier. “[Bucking this trend], 90% of Jow’s customers shop using their mobile devices, the experience is so smooth and fast that you can do your weekly shopping in just one minute on the subway or the bus”.

By Miles, the U.K. pay-by-mile car insurance provider, is launching a “connected car” insurance policy specifically for Tesla drivers.

The new insurance product pulls real-time mileage information directly from a car owner’s Tesla account and uses the distance they have driven to price their insurance each month. It claims to be the first car insurance policy to take data from a car without the need for a “black box” or aftermarket device.

The new policy — created in partnership with digital insurer La Parisienne Assurances (backed by Swiss Re) — offers lower mileage Tesla owners in the U.K. (those that drive under 7,000 miles a year) the opportunity to save significantly on their annual car insurance, according to By Miles.

More broadly, the insurtech says it is bucking the trend of car insurance not keeping pace with changes in technology, including the move to connected and electric cars. It cites industry figures that suggest 1 in 10 new cars sold in the U.K. are now electric.

James Blackham, co-founder of By Miles, says the insurance industry needs to “catch up and launch policies as smart as the cars themselves”.

To activate the pay-per-mile Tesla policy, drivers simply connect their Tesla with their By Miles account, with no need to install a separate so-called “black box”. Via the By Miles app, they are then able to instantly see the cost of each day’s miles and pay for what they’ve driven monthly.

The new policy also claims to provide electric-first policy coverage, including covering items often not included on insurance policies as standard, such as “damage or theft of charging cables and accessories as well as electric car batteries”.

Meanwhile, in other ways the By Miles connected car policy isn’t so much of a deviation from the company’s existing By Miles coverage. It first launched a pay-by-mile policy in July 2018 enabled by its “Miles Tracker” device that plugs into your car to count mileage, and now claims over 10,000 policyholders.

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This week saw a ton of activity in the space industry, with multiple launches, key preparations for commercial crew missions, robots and much more.

Besides all the real space news, there’s also some extreme fan service for Star Wars lovers, courtesy of Disney and Boeing. Now I’m one day closer to my lifelong dream of becoming a real X-Wing starfighter pilot.

Rocket Lab completes key step towards reusable rockets

Launch startup Rocket Lab has been successfully delivering payloads to orbit for a while now, but earlier this year they announced they’d be moving to a launch system in which the booster they use to propel their spacecraft to orbit is reusable.

During their 10th mission with their Electron rocket, they took a crucial first step – testing the re-entry systems to bring the booster back to Earth’s atmosphere. Rocket Lab says the test went better than expected, which bodes well from moving to an actual test of properly recovering and refurbishing the thing.

SpaceX launches 19th Space Station resupply mission

The other big launch this week was SpaceX’s CRS-19 launch, which delivered 5,200 lbs of experiments and supplies to the ISS. This launch used a brand new Falcon 9, which SpaceX recovered with a landing at sea, and it also employed a Dragon cargo capsule that the company has flown twice before. On board, there’s a load of amazing new equipment for the ISS, like a ‘robot hotel.’

Emotionally intelligent IBM-powered assistant robot is heading to space

You may not have heard, but there’s an advanced Alexa for astronauts called CIMON, and after a successful first test, it’s headed back to the ISS aboard the above SpaceX launch with improvements. One of its key improvements is a new ability to detect and respond to human emotions, which is, you know, HAL territory.

SpaceX completes 7th parachute test

SpaceX is getting closer to a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to its ability to launch astronauts on its commercial crew spacecraft. The company needs to do at least 10 parachute tests in a row to get ship-shape for its crew launch, and it’s now pretty close to getting that done before year’s end.

Boeing completes dress rehearsal of crew launch

Boeing is also getting closer to its own commercial crew launch, and in fact completed an entire rehearsal of how the mission will go on on launch day when it does its uncrewed launch. This rehearsal including fully feeling the rocket, and next time that happens, it’ll be taking off.

Real X-Wings fly for real (really)

X-Wing starfighters ascended through the night sky over Orlando, Florida this week as Disney celebrated the opening of its new ‘Rise of the Resistance’ attraction at Disney World. The X-Wings (2 of them!) were modified versions of a large cargo drone that Boeing has been developing, but both companies are keeping mum on any further details right now.

Here’s what’s up in the world of space startups and investing

What’s going on with space tech, and why is it having a moment? What’s coming next, and where is the smart money going? The answers to those questions and more lie in Starburst founder and aerospace investor François Chopard’s informative deck about space and defense, available exclusively to Extra Crunch subscribers.

Snapchat is preparing to launch a big new feature that uses your selfies to replace the faces of people in videos you can then share. It’s essentially a simplified way to Deepfake you into GIFs. Cameos are an alternative to Bitmoji for quickly conveying an emotion, reaction, or silly situation in Snapchat messages.

Some French users received a test version of the feature today, as spotted by Snap enthusiast @Mtatsis.

TechCrunch reached out to Snap, which confirmed Cameo’s existence, and that it’s currently testing in limited availability in some international markets. The company provided this statement: “Cameos aren’t ready to take the stage yet, but stay tuned for their global debut soon!”

With Cameo, you’ll take a selfie to teach Snapchat what you look like. Then you choose if you want a vaguely male or female body type (no purposefully androgenous option).

Cameo then lives inside the Bitmoji button in the Snapchat messaging keyboard. Snapchat has made a bunch of short looping video clips with sound that you can choose from. Snapchat will then stretch and move your selfie to create different facial reactions that Cameo can apply to actors’ heads in the videos. You just pick one of these videos that now star you and send it to the chat.

Cameo could help Snapchat keep messaging interesting, which is critical since that remains its most popular and differentiated feature. With Instagram and WhatsApp having copied its Stories to great success, it must stay ahead in chat. Though in this case, Snap could be accused of copying Chinese social app Zao which let users more realistically Deepfake their faces into videos. Then again, JibJab popularized this kind of effect many years ago to stick your face on dancing Christmas elves.

Snap is only starting to monetize the messaging wing of its app with ads inside social games. Snap might potentially sell sponsored, branded Cameo clips to advertisers similar to how the company offers sponsored augmented reality lenses.

Cameo could put a more fun spin on technology for grafting faces into videos. Deepfakes can be used as powerful weapons of misinformation or abuse. But by offering only innocuous clips rather than statements from politicians or pornography, Snapchat could turn the tech into a comedic medium.

[Image Credit: Jeff Higgins]

After more than a year of teasing, Apple finally unveiled the new Mac Pro at WWDC in June. The long wait was finally over — though Apple left out one key detail: when, precisely the high end desktop would arrive, beyond a purposefully vague fall timeframe

Earlier this, however, the company began sending out pre-pre-order notifications to potential consumers (spotted by Marques Brownlee), noting the orders will open December 10. When, precisely, they’ll start shipping is another question entirely, of course, but at the very least, you can get a raincheck for the extremely exepsnive Christmas present.

The system starts at $5,999, plus the $4,999 Pro Display XDR monitor. You should probably also factor in the much ballyhooed stand, which adds another $999 to the price tag. Of course, price has never been Apple’s main selling point — something that goes double for the Mac Pro line. And the company’s clearly not holding anything back with this system, as it recommits itself to creative professionals.

Contrary to earlier rumors, Apple noted back in September that the new Pro will be built in the U.S., like its predecessor.

It’s among the most iconic images of the last few decades — a picture of an unknown man standing before a line of tanks during the protests in 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. In just one shot, the photographer, Jeff Widener, managed to convey a society struggling between the freedoms of individual citizens and the heavy hand of the Chinese militarized state.

It’s also an image that few within China’s “great firewall” have access to, let alone see. For those who have read 1984, it can almost seem as if “Tank Man” was dropped into a memory hole, erased from the collective memory of more than a billion people.

By now, it’s well-known that China’s search engines like Baidu censor such political photography. Regardless of the individual morality of their decisions, it’s at least understandable that Chinese companies with mostly Chinese revenues would carefully hew to the law as set forth by the Chinese Communist Party. It’s a closed system after all.

What we are learning though is that it isn’t just Chinese companies that are aiding and abetting this censorship. It’s Western companies too. And Western workers aren’t pleased that they are working to enforce the anti-freedom policies in the Middle Kingdom.

Take Shutterstock, which has come under great fire for complying with China’s great firewall. As Sam Biddle described in The Intercept last month, the company has been riven internally between workers looking to protect democratic values, and a business desperate to expand further in one of the world’s most dynamic countries. From Biddle:

Shutterstock’s censorship feature appears to have been immediately controversial within the company, prompting more than 180 Shutterstock workers to sign a petition against the search blacklist and accuse the company of trading its values for access to the lucrative Chinese market.

Those petitions have allegedly gone nowhere internally, and that has led employees like Stefan Hayden, who describes nearly ten years of experience at the company as a frontend developer on his LinkedIn profile, to resign:

The challenge of these political risks is hardly unknown to Shutterstock. The company’s most recent annual financial filing with the SEC lists market access and censorship as a key risk for the company (emphasis mine):

For example, domestic internet service providers have blocked and continue to block access to Shutterstock in China and other countries, such as Turkey, have intermittently restricted access to Shutterstock. There are substantial uncertainties regarding interpretation of foreign laws and regulations that censor content available through our products and services and we may be forced to significantly change or discontinue our operations in such markets if we were to be found in violation of any new or existing law or regulation. If access to our products and services is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors can successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our contributor and customer base may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected.

Thus the rub: market access means compromising the very values that a content purveyor like Shutterstock relies on to operate as a business. The stock image company is hardly unique to find itself in this position; it’s a situation that the NBA has certainly had to confront in the last few weeks:

It’s great to see Shutterstock’s employees standing up for freedom and democracy, and if not finding purchase internally with their values, at least walking with their feet to other companies who value freedom more reliably.

Unfortunately, far too many companies — and far too many tech companies — blindly chase the dollars and yuans, without considering the erosion in the values at the heart of their own business. That erosion ultimately adds up — without guiding principles to handle business challenges, decisions get made ad hoc with an eye to revenues, intensifying the risk of crises like the one facing Shutterstock.

The complexity of the Chinese market has only expanded with the country’s prodigious growth. The sharpness, intensity, and self-reflection of values required for Western companies to operate on the mainland has reached new highs. And yet, executives have vastly under-communicated the values and constraints they face, both to their own employees but also to their shareholders as well.

As I wrote earlier this year when the Google China search controversy broke out, it’s not enough to just be militant about values. Values have to be cultivated, and everyone from software engineers to CEOs need to understand a company’s objectives and the values that constrain them.

As I wrote at the time:

The internet as independence movement is 100% dead.

That makes the ethical terrain for Silicon Valley workers much more challenging to navigate. Everything is a compromise, in one way or another. Even the very act of creating value — arguably the most important feature of Silicon Valley’s startup ecosystem — has driven mass inequality, as we explored on Extra Crunch this weekend in an in-depth interview.

I ultimately was in favor of Google’s engagement with China, if only because I felt that the company does understand its values better than most (after all, it abandoned the China market in the first place, and one would hope the company would make the same choice again if it needed to). Google has certainly not been perfect on a whole host of fronts, but it seems to have had far more self-reflection about the values it intends to purvey than most tech companies.

It’s well past time for all American companies though to double down on the American values that underly their business. Ultimately, if you compromise on everything, you stand for nothing — and what sort of business would anyone want to join or back like that?

China can’t be ignored, but neither should companies ignore their own duties to commit to open, democratic values. If Tank Man can stand in front of a line of tanks, American execs can stand before a line of their colleagues and find an ethical framework and a set of values that can work.